or belief; without preventing discussion, contradiction, and reversal by subsequent legislation.
The ability of De Maistre is everywhere acknowledged. But he is a crowning illustration of error by excess. He is afflicted, as the same critic said, with the malady of logical intemperance. He is a victim of his own love of paradox. His passionate, masterful desire to push everything to the most extreme conclusions lands one on the brink of an intellectual abyss frightful to contemplate. He escapes with acrobatic agility where in all reason he ought to fall, and would fall, if his passion did not sustain him; where certainly calmer men must fall.[1]
In addition to De Maistre, there was Lamennais—a philosopher rather than a theologian; clever, acute, impassioned, rhetorical; a sort of French Tertullian. In profound mistrust of human reason, he threw himself with emotional violence into the work of exalting authority as the one refuge and salvation against error. Unbalanced and extreme in all he did, he ended in an equally violent reaction against the very authority which he had laboured to exalt. But the moral of the change was lost upon his countrymen. Scandalised by his apostasy, they clung to his earlier ideals, and continued to maintain what the master had forsaken. He lived in discredit and died in distress, after mournfully witnessing the wide extension of an Extremist school, which he had devoted his best years to create, but was totally unable to restrain.
3. A third important factor was the political pressure exerted by the French Government upon the Church.
- ↑ Revue des deux Mondes (1858), p. 630. Cf. Lenormant's opinion of Joseph de Maistre: "Il avait plus de talent que de science, et surtout de bon sens, et pour ma part, je ne me rangerai jamais parmi ses disciples."—Les Origines de l'Histoire, i. p. 67, n.
